It isn’t exactly breaking news to reveal that Donald Trump has lied about something. He does that nearly every time he opens his mouth (see the Trump Bullshitopedia). But it is still necessary to hold him accountable for his blatant dishonesty. That’s especially true when the consequences include world annihilation.

At a rally in Fresno, California today, Trump delivered another of his incoherent, stream-of-consciousness, performance art pieces. When he got to the point where he taunts Hillary Clinton with his childish nicknames he spun a little story for his audience, complete with an awful Clinton imitation, about how he spent the previous evening.

“I watched her last night and she lies so much and she was saying last night, ‘Donald Trump wants to see Japan get nuclear weapons. He wants to see South Korea arm themselves and get nuclear weapons.’ I never said that.”

First of all, let’s take a look at what Clinton actually said (and it was last week, not last night):

“Look what he’s done just in the last week. He’s attacked our closest ally, Great Britain. He has praised the reckless dictator in North Korea. He has said we should pull out of NATO, our strongest military alliance. He has advocated for more countries having nuclear weapons.”

Clinton did touch on the fact that Trump has, in contravention to more than fifty years of American foreign policy, advocated for scrapping our nuclear non-proliferation stance. But more to the point, what Trump claims to have never said, he actually did say just two months ago to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who specifically asked him if he was OK with more nations acquiring nuclear capability:

“At some point we have to say, you know what, we’re better off if Japan protects itself against this maniac in North Korea. We’re better off, frankly, if South Korea is going to start to protect itself. … Saudi Arabia, absolutely. … It’s going to happen anyway.”

So it was Trump who enumerated the countries that he thinks should be nuclear armed. Clinton merely summarized his proposal. And now Trump wants to pretend that he never made it at all. In the process he is calling Clinton a liar for saying that he said some stuff that he did, in fact, say.

That’s the level of derangement that we’re dealing with in this era of reality TV presidential campaigns. Donald Trump is unarguably the most dishonest candidate in contemporary politics. That has been certified by the non-partisan fact-checkers at PolitiFact who found that he has been untruthful in 76 percent of the statements they have rated. That compares to Hillary Clinton’s 71 percent truthful ratings.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.